10 Cars to Drive Before You Die

For the broadest automotive experience before your dirt nap, we suggest these 10.

Arguments are frequent in our office, and sometimes they even have to do with cars. On topics such as comparison-test winners, 10Best, and the proper way to brew a pot of French roast, our wide range of opinions and preferences quickly outstrips our civility, and whittling down the list for this story came close to inciting a riot. In this year alone, there are more than 400 vehicles available in the U.S., so to sift all of global automotive history down to 10 great cars to drive before you die was a momentous task. No doubt some of your favorites didn’t make the list. We sympathize. Some staff members still aren’t speaking to one another.

Ultimately, we settled on the cars below because they are the best representations of their respective eras in automotive development, the purest distillation of what we consider to be necessary automotive traits, and because these 10 would provide a person a broad and comprehensive overview of automotive history. And our readers settled on the 11th car thanks to members of the Honda S2000 forum at www.s2ki.com, who pulled together an unmatched campaign effort in our blog voting. (For the record, the second-highest vote getter was the Bugatti Veyron, followed by the McLaren F1.)

Compared with many of the cars in this collection, the prospect of getting behind the wheel of a Model T Ford might seem a trifle tame, not to mention primitive. Just 20 hp, two forward speeds, three foot pedals (one for reverse), advance the spark, retard the spark, a top speed of about 40 mph—novel, but hardly a thrill ride.

However, the unique part of this experience is cultural. Driving a Model T gives the operator a portal into the dawn of the automobile age, when cars made the transition from toys for the few to an everyday necessity for the many. It can be argued that more people learned to drive in a Model T than in any other car ever and that no motor vehicle has had a bigger influence on history. At one time, shortly after World War I, half the cars on the planet were Model T Fords, a fact that makes the prospect of actually driving one a bit more plausible than driving some of the other cars arrayed here. When Model T production ended in May 1927 after a 19-year run, the tally stood at just over 15 million. A good many of those cars have survived—experts estimate at least 25,000—in decent running condition. There might even be one in your neighborhood.

It was big—finished cars commonly weighed over 2.5 tons. It was potent. It was brutish. It was just flat magnificent. The engineering was cutting edge for the day, and even in an age of grand classics, the Duesy’s 6.9-liter straight-eight made its contemporaries—Cadillac’s V-16, the Packard Twin Six, the Marmon V-16, the Lincoln V-12—look a little tepid.

In basic J configuration, introduced in 1928, the DOHC 32-valve eight was rated for 265 hp, phenomenal at the time. Supercharging was added in 1932, creating the SJ and bumping output to 320 hp. Of the 500 or so Duesenbergs built between 1928 and 1937, only 36 were SJs, which makes driving opportunities pretty rare, even though most of them survive. If the prospect somehow presents itself, this car’s combination of power, speed, and opulence is as uniquely seductive today as it was some 80 years ago—the supercharger spooling up and down, the whine of straight-cut gears, double-clutching for downshifts, the rumble of the straight-eight, the heavy steering, the sense of enormous mass well managed. A contemporary writer characterized the SJ as “an elegant roughneck.” The accuracy of that description endures.

Shortly after the Citroën DS’s launch in 1955, French philosopher Roland Barthes wrote that it had “obviously fallen from the sky.” Pronounced “déesse,” which means “goddess” in French, it looked like nothing else on earth. Streamlined to the max, Citroën’s proudest car boasted a hydropneumatic suspension, a fiberglass roof, and a one-spoke steering wheel—among many other technological highlights. In 1967, swiveling headlights were added—recently extolled as a great innovation by other carmakers.

Driving the DS for the first time, you will look like an absolute fool. Back when it was launched, just like today, you basically needed to learn driving it from scratch. The brakes bite at the hint of a touch, the steering is strongly self-centering, and the optional semiautomatic transmission needs to be treated with the utmost care. In today’s environment, the DS would be utterly demolished by consumer advocates. But when you master the goddess, she reveals her beauty. The driving experience soothes and is superbly comfortable, and the DS—despite its four-cylinder-only engine portfolio—is a fast car, with late models topping 115 mph. For decades, the irreverent DS was a preferred mode of transportation by intellectuals and aesthetes, based on a quality seldom associated with luxury cars: intellectual superiority.

There have been bad Ferraris through the years, but anything made in Maranello is still a special driving experience. And a Ferrari fitted with a V-12 engine is the most special of all: The first Ferrari had one, as did the firm’s dominant line of Le Mans winners in the 1950s and ’60s.

The greatest of Ferrari’s V-12s is undoubtedly the Colombo-designed 3.0-liter engine that powered a string of coupes, convertibles, and sports-racing cars in the 1950s and early ’60s. And the best all-around car to use this engine is the beautiful Pininfarina-styled Gran Turismo berlinetta made between 1960 and 1962, otherwise known as the SWB (for “short wheelbase”).

This engine sings and wails, its exhaust note accompanied by a tidal wave of induction roar and valvetrain noise. It goes as well as it sounds, with street versions making between 220 and 240 hp. The car is alive, from the engine to the steering to the shifter, with a seemingly telekinetic connection between a driver’s hands and feet and the mechanical components. The interface between the gas pedal and the three double-barrel Webers has a directness and precision that an electronic throttle can’t match. There’s simply no more soulful car on the planet.

There had been front-wheel-drive cars before Sir Alec Issigonis designed the Mini. But none of those cars’ designers had seized on the packaging advantages of the transverse engine layout to the extent that Issigonis did. The Mini is a miracle of maximizing interior space in a minimal package. A tad more than 10 feet long, riding on 10-inch-diameter wheels and tires, a Mini seats four people in reasonable comfort.

A base Mini was entertaining to drive, if slow. But when hopped up by John Cooper, boss of the racing-car company that won the 1959 and 1960 Formula 1 championships, the Mini became a riot on wheels. The ultimate development of this cooperation, the 1275-cc Mini Cooper S, made 76 hp and could just about reach 100 mph.

By today’s standards, the performance is pedestrian. Yet the Mini Cooper is still one of the world’s most enjoyable drives, thanks to a combination of screaming engine, short-throw gearshift, chuckable handling that defined the term “lift-throttle oversteer,” and teensy size. A Mini Cooper is the smallest car you might ever pilot, dainty enough that it feels as if you were putting it on like a shirt. Getting so much from so little is both really appealing and a uniquely rewarding driving experience.